BOSTON – The Boston Phoenix will close immediately, as will WFNX.com, the company’s online radio station, reported Boston.com.

A statement from the company retrieved by the news source revealed that the paper’s sister publications – The Providence Phoenix and The Portland Phoenix – will remain open.

All three papers are published by Phoenix Media/Communications Group of Boston.

While the stopping short of an official, public announcement, the Boston Phoenix Twitter account posted shortly before 3 p.m. Thursday, “Thank you Boston. Good night and good luck.”

In September, the Phoenix Media reinvented The Boston Phoenix from an “alternative” weekly newspaper covering largely politics, arts and entertainment to a glossy weekly magazine named The Phoenix after it combined the paper with Stuff Magazine.

In a release commenting on the closure, Executive Editor Peter Kadzis, a 25-year veteran of the Phoenix, said “I started reading the paper when I was 14 years old and had the fun and challenge of running it for 20 years or so. Political Boston, arts Boston, just won’t be the same. We are a text book example of sweeping market-place change. Our recent switch to a magazine format met with applause from readers and local advertisers. Not so -- with a few exceptions -- national advertisers.

“It was the long-term decline of national advertising dollars that made the Boston Phoenix economically unviable. Providence and Portland, however, don’t suffer from that problem. The local advertising market is sufficient to support those publications.”

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